By Ron English
Located in Kansas City, MO
Screen print, signed, numbered 107/200
Sheet size: 18 x 24 inches
English created Abraham Obama during the US presidential election 2008, where he mixed the facial impressions from Abraham Lincoln with Barack Obama.
Ron English, born 1966 in Dallas, Texas, is a contemporary artist. His focus is on advertising and popular brand imagery. He invented the name POPaganda for his unique style. His art features a mash-up of high and low cultural touchstones, including comic superhero mythology and totems of art history. He is considered important in the advancement of street art away from traditional wild-style lettering. Clever statements and masterful trompe l'oeil based art is his way of art. Since the 1980s, he has created illegal murals and billboards.
English can be considered the "celebrated prankster father of dollar-pop". He works on carefully created corporate icons in a way that they are turned upside down and therefore used against the very corporation they are meant to represent. Some of his illegal murals include one on the Berlin Wall's Checkpoint Charlie in 1989 and on the Palestinian separation wall in the West Bank in 2007 which he created with fellow street artists Banksy and Swoon. He has drawn several album covers for The Dandy Warhols, Slash and Chris Brown. Some of his paintings are used in Morgan Spurlock's documentaries Super Size Me and POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold. He has received special thanks and is credited as "The Greatest Living Artist". English is known for his photorealist techniques, his inventive use of colour and comic book collage. He sexualized animals, skeletal figures, Marilyn Monroe with Mickey Mouse breasts, the corpulent fast food spokesman MC Supersized, and of course Abraham Obama.
Pedro Carvajal made a documentary of English entitled Poopaganda, named after one of his art books. English is also a subject of Michael Leavitt's The Art Army action figures.
In 2012 English, together with his artist friends Shepard Fairey, Kenny Scharf and Robbie Conal...
Category
2010s Contemporary Ron English Art